A second planet has been discovered circling Beta Pictoris, a fledgling star in our own galaxy offering astronomers a rare glimpse of a planetary system in the making, according to a study published Monday.
"We talking about a giant planet about 3,000 times more massive ...

The Milky Way gobbled up a galaxy one quarter of its mass 10 billion years ago in a "violent collision" that didn't fully settle for eons, astronomers said in new research published Monday.
Previous studies had suggested that our home galaxy was composed of two ...

The Milky Way's signature halo is mostly stellar rubble from a cosmic collision with another galaxy a quarter of its size 10 billion years ago, scientists reported Wednesday.
The slow-motion crash with Gaia-Enceladus — named after the Greek mythological giant Enceladus, the offspring of the ...

To astronomers' relief, NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has won another reprieve.
The spacecraft — responsible for detecting thousands of planets beyond our solar system — slipped into emergency mode last week nearly 75 million miles from Earth. Ground controllers managed to stabilize the probe Sunday, ...

NASA is trying to resuscitate its planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, in a state of emergency nearly 75 million miles away.
The treasured spacecraft — responsible for detecting nearly 5,000 planets outside our solar system — slipped into emergency mode sometime last week. The last regular contact ...

Clusters of stars on the fringes of our Milky Way galaxy may be home to intelligent life. That's that word from an astrophysicist who's new to probing extraterrestrial territory.
Rosanne DiStefano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, presented her theory Wednesday at ...

The Milky Way galaxy resides on the outskirts of a massive, previously unknown galaxy super-cluster scientists have named Laniakea, from Hawaiian words for "immeasurable heaven."
The discovery, reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature, stems from a new mapping technique that combines not ...